Study on feasibility of SATCOM for railway communication

Final Report
main trends. Except for systems that do provide such support (e.g. Iridium), other
stakeholders are not actively working on it.
Voice support. Even though data services are more and more important in the railway
domain, voice remains a crucial requirement, especially for non-ETCS lines. Both kinds of
services are offered by most of the surveyed SATCOM providers.
Cost aspects. When asked about non-technological challenges for SATCOM in safety
applications, most SATCOM participants cited return on investment as their primary concern,
followed by market size. Consequently, most SATCOM providers would try to adapt existing
technologies and constellations (typically, GEO satellites operating in Ku- or Ka-band) to the
new domain, except if a large enough opportunity arises (e.g. for LEO/MEO satellites and/or
L-band services). RAIL participants were relatively less concerned about CAPEX/OPEX in a
SATCOM system, probably considering the cost of terrestrial systems.
Future role of SATCOM. RAIL stakeholders consider unanimously that SATCOM cannot be
the single, main solution for the future railway communications system. However, they mostly
(81%) agree on the possibility that SATCOM may play an important role as part of it, either as
a complementary system for some scenarios, a backup system, or a backhaul. SATCOM
stakeholders would tend to agree, considering aspects such as network convergence (5G)
and bandwidth sharing as the two main drivers for increasing SATCOM uptake in the railway
domain.
Suitable scenarios for SATCOM. According to 80% of the RAIL participants, SATCOM
would be well-suited for low-density/regional lines, with a limited number of users and
moderate-to-high speed. Other scenarios scored substantially worse among RAIL
stakeholders: main stations/shunting yards (34%) and dense/urban lines (27%). The low value
attributed in high-speed lines (33%) contrasts with the fact that SATCOM tends to cope better
with high speeds than terrestrial solutions.
Doc.Nº: SRAIL-FNR-010-IND
Edit./Rev.: 1/1
Date: 16/02/2017
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